number 34 • Winter 2018

Authors

Lester C. Thurow

articles

IN a recent issue of The Public Interest (No. 31, Spring 1973), Lester Thurow, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, argued that economic justice requires radical changes in the distribution of income and wealth in this country, and proposed specific redistributive measures. I shall argue three points here...

MODERN economics springs from the search for a definition of economic justice, but has largely abandoned that search. Thus, 19th-century utilitarian economists, such as John Stuart Mill, spent much of their time searching for the principles that would lead to a condition of equity. But by the 1940’s, economists reluctantly came to the conclusion that there were no economic statements that could be made about equity. In this they were in agreement with moral philosophers and other social scientists that no ethical statements can be deduced from purely factual or purely logical statements-the only two kinds of statements to be found in modern economic theory. By the 1950’s questions of economic equity were not even discussed in the basic textbooks, except to note that it was necessary for a market economy to start with a “just” distribution of economic resources. What made any such distribution “just” was left blank or was vaguely handed over to the political process.

HOWEVER much they may differ on other matters, the left, the center, and the right all affirm the central importance of education as a means of solving our social problems, especially poverty. To be sure, they see the education system in starkly contrasting terms. The left argues that the inferior education of the poor and of the minorities reflects a discriminatory effort to prevent them from competing with better-educated groups, to force them into menial, low-income jobs. The fight argues that the poor are poor because they have failed to work hard and get the education which is open to them. Moderates usually subscribe to some mixture of these arguments: The poor are poor because they have gotten bad educations, partly as a result of inadequately funded and therefore inferior school systems, but partly also as a result of sociological factors (e.g., disrupted families) that prevent poor children from absorbing the education that is available. Yet despite these differences, people at all points of the political spectrum agree that, if they were running the country, education policy would be the cornerstone of their effort to improve the condition of the poor and the minorities: If the poor or the minorities were better educated, they could get better jobs and higher income. This idea has had a profound influence on public policy in the last decade.